


Gentry

by GoldenUsagi



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Basically gen with a hint of potential Sherlock/John, Changelings, Fairies, Gen, Mythical Beings & Creatures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-30
Updated: 2014-09-30
Packaged: 2018-02-19 09:02:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2382620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenUsagi/pseuds/GoldenUsagi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock and Mycroft came from a warm home with loving parents, though you’d never suspect it from looking at them.  There is a reason.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gentry

**Author's Note:**

> Entanglednow and I have decided that we will each try to write one fic a month where Sherlock is some sort of supernatural creature. Be sure to check out her [fairy!Sherlock fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2382725) as well!
> 
> Beta'd by entanglednow and verdant_fire.

Sherlock didn’t speak until he was three years old. When he did, it was a fully constructed sentence, spontaneously blurted while they were in the back garden.

“I want to leave.”

Their parents, ecstatic at their son’s first words, jubilantly disregarded the words’ meaning.

Mycroft did not. He studied the scene from afar, a resigned look on his face.

It would be the same with Sherlock, then.

\-----

Sherlock sat at the top of the stairs long past his bedtime, listening to the conversation that drifted up from below. Mummy was worried about his emotional development. Daddy said that boys would be boys and Sherlock simply didn’t like being coddled.

Sherlock felt Mycroft’s silent footfalls come up beside him. At twelve, Mycroft seemed to have endless freedom. Mummy never made a fuss over tucking Mycroft in at night. 

“She’s upset because I never say I love her,” Sherlock said.

“And how does that make you feel?” Mycroft asked.

“It doesn’t.” Sherlock shrugged.

“Why do you go outside at night?” 

So Mycroft had noticed him slipping out his bedroom window and down the drainpipe to go sit in the darkened garden. No one else had.

“I don’t know.”

Mycroft raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you?”

Sherlock shook his head, honestly unsure of what his brother was getting at. “I just… _need_ to.”

Mycroft was silent.

\-----

It wasn’t until Sherlock was eight that Mycroft decided to provide him with the answer to the question he’d been silently asking all his life.

Not that it would do any good. It was an answer, but an empty one.

Mycroft would know.

\-----

When Sherlock crept back into his room that night, Mycroft was sitting on his bed.

“Out again, were we?”

“What do you want?”

Mycroft was fifteen, nearly grown, and insufferable.

“Tell me, do you even know what you’re looking for?”

Sherlock had asked himself the same question many times, but he wasn’t going to admit as much to Mycroft. “Nothing you would understand, I’m sure.”

“I understand you perfectly,” Mycroft said, his tone level and serious. “I understand you in a way that no one else will ever understand you, and you would do well to keep that in mind.”

Sherlock laughed, trying to make light of the situation, but it suddenly seemed like he was teetering on the edge of something.

“I’ve brought you some reading material,” Mycroft continued.

Sherlock looked at the small pile of books on his bedside table. “Fairy stories?” he scoffed.

Mycroft was perfectly sombre. “Yes.”

\-----

Sherlock read the books, noted the marked passages, and saw the conclusion his brother wanted him to draw.

He was furious with Mycroft for trying to manipulate him into believing such foolishness. Sherlock threw the books back in his brother’s room in the morning and didn’t speak to him for a full month. He resolved never to think about the nonsense he’d read again.

For over a year, he succeeded.

But one night when he was lying in the garden, threading the grass between his toes and waiting for dawn, he simply knew.

It was illogical and irrational, but he felt it in his bones: he didn’t belong here. There was nothing he could pinpoint, no evidence he could fix on, but in the space of one heartbeat to the next, he was devastatingly certain that this was never meant to be his world.

\-----

Mycroft was awakened by Sherlock rummaging through his bookcase in the early morning light. He sat up, and then saw what books Sherlock was after.

“Ah.”

“Spare me your ‘I told you so’.”

“How did you know?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Sherlock said, clearly annoyed. “I just feel it. It’s more than a wish to be elsewhere, more than not fitting in, it’s…” He trailed off.

“Part of what we are.”

“When did _you_ know?” Sherlock asked, turning around.

“After you arrived. Our parents’ natural child was a quiet, happy thing. I wasn’t particularly pleased or frustrated with having a new baby brother; it was just another fixture in my life. But nearly two months after being born, it was taken and you were left in its place. You screamed and wailed and weren’t pleased with your situation no matter what had been done for your comfort. Our parents thought it a phase.”

“You didn’t.”

Mycroft shook his head. “You looked exactly the same, down to the smallest detail. But there was no doubt in my mind that you had been switched from one morning to the next. Of course, I never said such a thing out loud. It sounded ludicrous, but more to the point, it had already been done.”

“You didn’t _care_ ,” Sherlock said desperately. He had always craved confirmation from Mycroft that he wasn’t alone in the inability to make the most basic emotional connections, that there was someone else who understood how foreign humanity seemed. “You didn’t care that their baby was gone.”

“Not in the slightest.”

“But how did you figure it out?”

“I stumbled across the answer entirely by chance while doing a project for school. It wasn’t until I was enlightened as to your origins that I realised they were my own as well.” Mycroft paused. “There’s a reason we don’t fit, Sherlock. We were never supposed to.”

\-----

Sherlock should have found the knowledge placating. Instead, it drove him nearly to madness. It was an answer that led to a thousand more questions.

He read everything he could about the mythology of changelings, but none of it provided him with what he was supposed to do _now_. He was just as trapped in this life as he had been before.

At nighttime, he started going over the back garden wall to roam in the meadows and woods beyond. His parents had long ago discovered his rambles, but had never found a way to stop him. But since he seemed unnaturally incapable of getting hurt or lost, even in the dead of night, they finally resigned themselves to it with a displeased sort of indulgence.

His mother in particular continually worried about him, but Sherlock had no patience for her. He moved away when she touched him and avoided her when she fussed over him. He turned inward more than ever.

When Mycroft left for university, he was adrift.

\-----

Sherlock read and reread everything he could. Then he started doing experiments.

There had to be a way _back_.

He never particularly wondered about the people who left him here. He didn’t feel abandoned or wish for connection; he only wanted the place where he belonged.

All his endeavours led him to a dead end. As far as Sherlock could tell, nothing in the myths was true except that there was a race of people who stepped sideways through reality and traded their children for human children.

He searched the woods for traces of them, but never saw anything out of the ordinary, no matter what time of the year he went outside or what type of plants he concealed about his person.

Other plants didn’t hurt him, and iron didn’t burn him. He wished he could press a horseshoe to his hand and show his mother the damage it did, so she could see that he wasn’t supposed to be here and would let him go.

He thought of simply running away, but it wasn’t this house he wanted to leave, it was this world.

Sherlock tried to boil water in an eggshell, but the only result was his father taking an interest.

Days later, he reached into the fire himself, frantically hoping that he would find his body flying up the chimney and transported away.

There were screams, and Sherlock didn’t realise they were his own until his mother pulled him away from the hearth.

\-----

At hospital, they numbed him to deal with the burns and wouldn’t let him look. He went home with bandaged hands and medicine to make him sleep.

When he woke, Mycroft was in his room. There were no scheduled uni holidays, which meant Mycroft had made a special trip.

“They’re worried about me,” Sherlock said.

“That would be putting it mildly.”

“I won’t do it again.”

“Obviously. You discovered what you needed to know.” It wasn’t a question.

Sherlock answered anyway. “Yes. There is no way back.”

“Which means you need to stop trying to escape this life and learn to live it.” Mycroft cleared his throat. “I’ve placed books on child psychology in your closet. Read them. Learn the markers you need to be hitting. Learn to display empathy in the appropriate situations. Stop doing things that draw the wrong sort of attention to yourself. Stop being cruel to the people who provide for you.”

“How do you do it?” Sherlock asked, hating how plaintive he sounded. “How do you fake it all the time?”

“Deception has always come easier to me than it has to you.”

“I’m excellent at lying,” Sherlock said, defensive.

“You are a master manipulator when it suits your purposes, but you never exert yourself to sustain a lie.”

“You don’t love them any more than I do. You hate their hovering, their _attention_. You’ve never been any more ‘emotionally available’ than I am.”

Mycroft nodded his head in agreement. “But I realised it was never to my advantage to be at odds with them. I’m not asking you to love them, Sherlock. But being respectful and agreeable will go a long way toward making your life bearable. A reserved manner has served me quite well; it takes the burden of excessive sentiment away.”

“I suppose.”

“When you’re grown, I promise you, you may do as you wish. I’ll manage whatever arrangements you desire. But for now, you must stop railing against what you cannot change.”

Sherlock studied Mycroft for a moment. He and Mycroft were brilliant and peculiar in the same ways, but Sherlock suspected that was nothing more than a characteristic of their race. It was possible they had no ties other than being left at the same house.

“Do you care about me?” Sherlock asked.

“We share the same circumstances. I’m fond of you and feel responsible for you. That’s as much as we’re capable of, I think.”

Sherlock found that he couldn’t argue with that.

\-----

Sherlock stopped. 

He stopped trying to uncover the world of his birth, stopped trying to break free of the life he was locked in. This was the world he had, and he was going to have to live in it for a very long time.

He stayed in at night, even if he didn’t sleep. He tolerated and engaged with his parents. He went to school without complaint and took up music, playing the violin. He was gifted and eccentric and often alone, but never again a problem.

Time passed, and slowly the trials of his early youth seemed to be forgotten by his family.

One school year followed another, and his teenage years passed in monotony.

University seemed like a welcome change, but really, it was more of the same. There were boring instructors and insipid classmates and pointless social rituals. Sherlock only finished because Mycroft promised to support him financially if he completed his degree.

“You’re never going to be able to make your own way in this world, after all,” Mycroft had said, practical and not at all smug. “But a degree will smooth certain things over, whether you ever have employment or not.”

Sherlock hadn’t argued with the statement. He’d never wanted to make his way in this world. The idea of a job actually pained him.

He would take Mycroft’s money gladly. If Mycroft made the stipulation that he had to complete a pointless degree, then so be it.

Sherlock had no idea what he would do with himself after he graduated, but there was peace in knowing that there would be no one to answer to, and no one to pretend for.

\-----

In Sherlock’s last year of uni, Mycroft bought a country estate from an impoverished aristocrat. Mycroft was young, but had invested his money very well, and it was beginning to show.

To look at him, you would never guess that he hadn’t been born and raised on a country estate. Though you could look at either of them and see that they didn’t belong here, in their childhood home.

But then, no one ever really looked. Even their parents were blind to it.

Sherlock found out about the sale over the Christmas holidays, after a family dinner.

“Trying to join the gentry?” Sherlock asked. He smirked at his own joke.

“Trying to find a retreat from the world,” Mycroft said, twirling the liquor around in his glass. “Don’t make fun, little brother, or I might rescind my offer.”

“What offer?”

“The one I’m about to make: for you to come and live with me,” he said, meeting Sherlock’s gaze. “I’ll be in London much of the time, of course, but I believe the place itself would do you good. You can have the run of the estate. It’s a small house, as these things go, but the grounds are quite extensive.”

Sherlock couldn’t deny how cooped up he’d felt at university, how much he longed to explore again, to have a place to survey that wasn’t adjacent to his parents’ garden.

He stared into the fire. “I think, brother mine, that I’ll take you up on that.”

\-----

Sherlock lived with Mycroft for six months.

It was surprisingly pleasant, as far as the actual living arrangements went. What was surprisingly unpleasant was how miserable taking off into the wilderness made him.

There was a connection between him and the land, as there had always been, but it hovered on the edge of infuriating. He felt like he could touch parts of the world that no one else could, and at the same time, knew that his connection should have been even _more_. There was nothing but wild beauty here, and his part in it would never be recoverable.

“Don’t you find it maddening?” Sherlock asked one night. “Doesn’t it call to you, tell you how wrong you are here?”

“It does,” Mycroft allowed. “But I was never as spirited as you. And I’ve found other diversions.”

Sherlock snorted. “Your game of politics.”

“Deception is second nature to us. It seemed a natural interest.”

There was a short silence.

“I want to go to London,” Sherlock stated. He had no idea if London would be just as horrid, but anything was better than staying here.

“Very well.”

\-----

London was marvellous.

He should have felt trapped by the buildings and concrete, but his expectations were overturned when the opposite happened. The city freed him. He no longer found himself yearning to be part of something that was lost to him, no longer looked at his surroundings and wondered if this or that was the corner he could turn and find his doorway back.

London was unnatural and no one belonged there, not even the people who built it.

Sherlock made it his own, just as Mycroft had.

He didn’t control the city’s ebb and flow like his brother did, but he came to know every rooftop and secret stairwell, every hidden door and back alleyway. Exploring the city was just as entertaining as going beyond the garden wall had been as a child.

His natural luck followed him as well. He always had an extra bounce in his step when he needed to reach or leap. Anything he threw hit its target with dead accuracy, even though he never practiced. And it remained impossible for him to ever get lost.

London was far from feeling like home, but it was a large enough distraction that it easily put such thoughts out of Sherlock’s head, banishing them to a corner of his mind that he resolutely shut the door on.

\-----

When Sherlock was twenty-six, Mycroft found him out of his mind on cocaine. He had suspected something for a while, but this was the first time he’d managed to catch Sherlock at it.

Sherlock stumbled off the sofa, gaping at Mycroft like he’d never seen him before.

“You look so different.” He took Mycroft’s face in his hands. “So different! Do you know how different you look? Is this what we lost? Is this what we were?”

If Mycroft hadn’t already been there to get Sherlock off the drugs, those words would have made up his mind on the spot.

He threatened to have Sherlock sectioned and sent to rehab, but all it took in the end was showing his brother a video of himself while high.

Sherlock stared at the phone, aghast.

“I believe you came to London to stop chasing that particular impossibility,” Mycroft commented idly.

“I did.” Sherlock swallowed. “I didn’t know it was making me do this, making me see this.”

“What did you think it was doing?”

“Making everything _stop_.” Sherlock’s hands shook. “The thoughts still drive me mad sometimes. I thought this would make them stop.”

“Clearly, it had the opposite effect.” Mycroft extracted his phone from Sherlock’s grasp. “Get off the cocaine, Sherlock. Or it’s no different than sitting in Mummy’s garden and staring past the gate.”

\-----

Five years later, Sherlock met John.

And for the first time in his life, he _felt_ something for another person. He was unsure what it was, but it was there, new and strange and different. Most of the time, he didn’t dwell on it, but simply let it rest in the back of his mind to see what it did.

He found himself pleased with his association with John and enjoyed John’s company. The amazing part was that Sherlock never had to modify his own behaviour to make John enjoy his.

Mycroft asked him once, when he was being especially unpleasant, what was so special about John Watson.

“Nothing,” Sherlock said easily. “He’s completely unremarkable.”

“Then what on earth is your fixation on him?”

“I don’t belong here. I never will. But when I’m with John, it ceases to matter.”

The smirk disappeared from Mycroft’s face. “Well. If he gives you peace, then I retract my reservations. I do, however, have a word of caution. If John becomes attached to you in a way that you cannot reciprocate, you will either be forced to disappoint him or to once again live a pretence in your daily life. Such a situation will eventually become less than agreeable to both of you.”

“Your concern is noted,” Sherlock said dryly. He paused, staring past Mycroft. “Sometimes John makes me feel.”

Mycroft blinked at him very slowly. “Feel what?”

“I don’t know.”

And he didn’t. But Sherlock trusted that he would figure it out.


End file.
